Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday July 26, 2010 @10:51AM
from the free-language dept.

pinkushun writes "SarcMark is a copyrighted punctuation mark, that claims 'It's time that sarcasm is treated equally!' Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey. Open Sarcasm is destroying SarcMark by advocating a new punctuation mark (not displaying here properly — alt+U0161) as the new open and free sarcasm symbol. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue. PS Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."

Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."

Slashdot is written in Perl, a language that tends to self-obfuscate within minutes of having been written. Consequently, updating the code base for trivial things like correct display of posted text is highly problematic. Also, even if the Perl implementation was written in non-standard (that is, comprehensible) fashion, to quote Rob Malda in a recent letter to me, "Unfortunately there really isn't any engineering time available to make any changes these days"

What the hell are they so busy doing? Clearly not editing article submissions.

It is a careful balance between collecting ad revenue and ignoring the shortcomings of the moderation mechanism.

Only the most modern of management techniques have been used to arrive at this complex and deeply nuanced operating strategy; only here, at the heart of the technical community, can we find an implementation that so perfectly reflects (in the sense of reflection about the opposite axis) the technical nature of its users.

I go back to python code a year later, it's blatantly obvious what it's doing.

I go back to perl code a year later, it might as well be sanskrit. It is *loaded* with bullshit like $_, $., $? and similar that are towards the APL end of the scale in absolute opacity; if you use these (and you should), your code will devolve into unreadable crap, because reading it isn't possible... you have to interpret it on the fly, it's simply not human-r

I always used the tilde to indicate "moustache" or "backwards 'S' taking a nap"since those two concepts rarely entered my on-line conversations, I rarely used the tilde.But, hey! yeah... I could use the tilde to indicate sarcasm! What a ~great~ idea!

What happened to the tilde (~), I thought that was pretty universal as sarcasm.

Seems a lot more practical than an all-new proprietary mark for sarcasm, and also a lot clearer than the "open sarcasm" Ethiopian option, which kind of looks a lot like a lower-case "I"...

So, yeah, I'm totally on board with the whole idea of adopting the SarcMark@ (At-sign is the closest thing I've got to a spiral around a dot...)And I think the Open Sarcasm thing is gonna work out really, really welliJokes really out to be marked so there's no question you're joking around~

I thought the sarcasm mark came after the normal end of a sentence, i.e. you end the sentence as ".~" rather than just ".". That's pretty unambiguous, as opposed to a tilde on its own which can mean all sorts of things.

I haven't seen tildes used in that way, but the tongue-poking-out smiley (:P ) is a widely recognized indicator of joking / sillyness, which indicates sarcasm when used with an otherwise serious sounding sentence.

And if you can't figure out when someone is being sarcastic in plaintext, the problem is DEFINITELY with you and not them.:P
(Yes, that was sarcasm. It's often impossible to tell whether a comment is sarcastic or serious, especially between strangers on the internet. Duh.)

Slashdot filters out just about all useful Unicode for no good reason other than laziness. People were abusing control characters, but they were too lazy to make a proper blacklist and instead opted for an almost nonexistent whitelist.

by advocating a new story topic (not displaying here properly - alt-ctrl-del) as the new form of grammar and coherence. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad grammar and coherence across the web, advocating a new story topic properly might be an issue. PS Left out new story topic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the alt-ctrl-del character.

The special offtopic character is (not displaying here properly, alt-F4) used when you want to steer the conversation toward a disastrous end, a.k.a. trolling. PS I left out the troll I had prepared for the end of this post because Slashdot doesn't display the alt-F4 character.

The British already have one. E.g.:
Oh, you're so right, I guess I should be more concerned with Bart's safety than covering my own butt(!). And maybe I'm talking like this, because I can't stop(!). HELP ME LISA(!). I HAVE SERIOUS MENTAL PROBLEMS(!).

If you need a punctuation mark to express sarcasm then you are not doing it right.

It is like a laugh track or a drum rimshot to indicate a joke's punchline. It only accompanies the worst forms of humor.

I'm reminded of Laurence Olivier's remark to Dustin Hoffman, who had subjected himself to sleep deprivation to prepare himself for his role in "Marathon Man". Hoffman came onto the set, looking like hell, and explained what he did to prepare. Olivier said, "Dear chap, next time try acting." No special punctuation mark needed.

Hard to argue that it is essential if we've had 2500 years of written Indo-European languages and we managed to express sarcasm just fine without requiring another character. If we lacked something essential I assume the Gauls would have added it 1800 years ago. They were far more sarcastic than us moderns.

Note I have nothing against a parenthetical expression or other notation using existing characters. This might be good for expressing a variety of things, like "This sentence is funny" or "This phrase

Within a spoken conversation sarcasm is usually accompanied by a change in facial expressions or in the voice. It doesn't make it worse, it only makes it better. A sarcastic mark could stand for that, just like an exclamation mark is used when you'd raise your voice, or an emoticon gets used for other emotions. Now, it will probably be abused, just like emoticons and exclamation marks do !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111:PPPPPP, but nevertheless it serves a purpose. Online sarcasm seems too harsh without a sarcastic mark.

One problem is that there are different expressions that go with sarcasm, not one, both friendly and unfriendly, but written conversation doesn't try to match spoken exactly. They are different forms of conversations with their own intricacies. Adding another mark that allows you to add more to those intricacies is only good.

But ditto for other things as well. I can ask a normal question, a rhetorical question, a negative question, a hesitant question, a imperative question, a leading question, a disbelieving question, even a sarcastic question. Should we have a glyph for each of them? Really? Are you kidding? What makes sarcasm so special compared to every other language nuance that it requires its own glyph?

What makes sarcasm so special? The inability of many persons to tell apart sarcasm from a regular assertion, I am afraid.I am not a sarcastic person, but I tend to see a lot of misunderstandings among persons that are, and other random Average Joes. You can see examples in any forum or mailing list.

If you need a punctuation mark to express sarcasm then you are not doing it right.

Unfortunately, this isn't true. It is always possible for somebody to misunderstand. Indeed, to misappropriate a law, any sufficiently idiotic honestly held point of view is indistinguishable from sarcasm.

Well, duh. Writing is not the same as speaking. There are lot of things that are lacking in writing: accents, intonation, gesture, body language, etc. Should we encode them all? Should we write in the International Phonetic Alphabet with notated choreography and stage directions?

Of course not. Writing is different than speaking, and we adapt our use of language to the medium. One is not worse than the other. They are merely different. But trying to pretend they are two forms of the same thing... thi

Well, duh. Writing is not the same as speaking. There are lot of things that are lacking in writing: accents, intonation, gesture, body language, etc. Should we encode them all? Should we write in the International Phonetic Alphabet with notated choreography and stage directions?

There are lot of things that are lacking in writing: accents, intonation, gesture, body language, etc. Should we encode them all?

Should we encode none of them?

Your examples (accents, intonation, gesture, body language) generally serve to add to what's being said. Sometimes, however, they are essential parts of the message being communicated, and therefore need to be encoded in writing. The question mark is one example. When speaking, we use inflection to communicate the fact that our sentence is a question. In writing, we replace the customary period with a question mark.

This wasn't an issue even 30 years ago. Writing was a much rarer thing - nearly everything written beyond a yellow sticky note was at least somewhat formal. Hell we even had typograpical rules we all had to learn for writing a letter to your granny to thank her for the nice whatevers.

Trouble is - we don't LIVE in that world anymore. The internet and cellphones have turned writing into a conversational medium as much so as talking used to be.Nobody every WRO

I think the general trend over the last 100 years has been to reduce the variety of punctuation marks in use, not increase them. The semi-colon is seldom seen these days, at least not used correctly. It is being replaced by the comma in many cases. Ellipsis is now generally replaced by periods. Hyphens, em- and en-dash are now all conflated, except by typographers and the more fastidious editors. So the general trend is to reduce the number of punctuation marks in use.

But it isn't the sarcasm that failed. It is generally quite a bit funnier when someone, or even better a thundering herd, takes it seriously.Similarly, when an earnest statement is interpreted as humour. The answer is not to lower the bar. Much better to beat the clueless mercilessly with it.

Can we all agree to use the exclamation point at the beginning of a sentence to denote sarcasm?A question mark at the end makes sense as it's right at the end, if you read the main part in your 'mind voice', raising tone at the end makes sense.For sarcasm, you need to know at the beginning of the sentence, so the punctuation needs to go there.! would work I think

Quelle surprise. Does Slashdot display any Unicode characters correctly, apart from English letters and punctuation? I think I saw some madman use the British pound symbol once, but that was Dark Magic and he was burned at the stake.

If sarcasm is done right, as a previous poster mentioned, then it should be obvious, and thus a symbol is not needed.

If the inventor of the sarcasm symbol needs help understand sarcasm, why should the rest of us point it out to him? And, for that matter, why should we pay him for the privilege of point it out to him.

Anyway, there is already a well know symbol that doesn't require any addition to the Unicode standard, nor any addition to any existing fonts.:-p

"Reminds me of a joke where an American actually 'got' sarcasm for the first time."

Whatever. I was watching "As time goes by" (britcom starring Judy Dench) with some friends. Jean and Lionel took a trip to Hollywood to shop a story to a production company. A production assistant (obviously an American character played by a British actor) came on the set and asked where Lionel was (he was in the toilet.) When Dench replied he was taking a leak the "American" looked toward the ceiling and covering his head. Everyone of my friends laughed and one of them said "The British must be idiots!"A b

Please please please please please, dot NOT overload Unicode by assigning a punctuation to U+0161. This is the code for a small s with caron, and is necessary for writing Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Slovak, and other languages. If you want to support a new character, put it in the Private Use Areas. There's over 130,000 code points that are set aside, just for this sort of thing. It's like those idiots trying to support the new Indian Rupee symbol, but end up calling in to question the interpretation of all s

That's SOOOO interesting. I mean, we REALLLLLY need help in pointing out when someone's being sarcastic. That'll be SOOOO helpful. I can't even BEGIN to tell you how useful that will be. These people REALLY are geniuses, and I TOTALLY mean that.

While that may be true, TFA says that the open sarcasm mark is U+00A1, an upside-down exclamation point, to be used at the end of a sentence.

Graphically indistinguishable from U+00A1 () Temherte Slaqî differs in semantic use in Ethiopia. Temherte Slaqî will come at the end of a sentence (vs at the beginning in Spanish use) and is used to indicate an unreal phrase, often sarcastical in editorial cartoons. Temherte Slaqî is also important in children’s literature and in poetic use.

At opensarcasm.org they mention the Ethiopian sarcasm mark, the Temherte Slaqî. It's pretty much indistinguishable from the Spanish initial exclamation mark. I'd show it here, but Slashdot doesn't support anything beyond basic ASCII, apparently.

It seems like a fairly nonsensical symbol to me. If it's meaning is not immediately obvious and you actually have to explain what it means, it is doomed to failure. Oh, yeah, and actually have to pay to download it and assume that whomever you're speaking to has paid and downloaded it as well. Just imagine the back-and-forth conversion with your mom/dad/grandma/grandpa/[enter technically-illiterate relative or acquaintance of your choice here]...

With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue.

To what "bad unicode support" is the submitter referring? The Web has excellent Unicode support. Every browser supports just about every BMP Unicode character I can throw at it (except IE in Windows XP, but even that does at least a fair job).

You wouldn't want that kind of fun to stop, would you? That's one of the best parts of sarcasm. Pitching it over the heads of stupid people and watching them not get it. There is an element of sadism to really good sarcasm, and a punctuation mark to make it obvious would ruin that.

Sarcasm, Inc., is based in Washington, Michigan, a bit north of Detroit. I, for one, will be paying the buck ninety-nine to support the Michigan economy. We're at over 13% unemployment, and we never recovered from losing our manufacturing economy. And now, my great state has once again started building something: punctuation! If you support open punctuation, you're destroying Michigan jobs!

Oh, I just visited their website, and there's no Linux version of the SarcMark software.

Let's put this thing in perspective. I'm in France where the Euro has been legal tender for about 10 year, I'm a geek who changes computer every couple years, and even on my brand new Dell laptop 8G+500G+4proc I have no frigging idea where the euro key is. So for me (and many others), the solution to the sarcasm symbol will be;-) or:-P for quite a while still.